light the few grains of precious metal hidden in it. Infinitely more is it worth all the labor it costs to break through that harder shell in which man hides his intrinsic gold. And besides, it will not reflect much credit on the largeness of your own culture, if you suffer a mere offence against taste and manners to keep you ignorant of your companion's deeper nature. "But how to draw him out? What effectual method to break through this hard or coarse covering?" I have no infallible directions to give you. But you must first have a genuine interest in him as a new specimen of _a man_; and then you must be able to inspire him with confidence in you, confidence that you respect him for his human nature and hold yourself to be on an equality with him, inasmuch as "man measures man the world over." Start some topic which will evidently not be remote from his familiar range, and by a little tact you will easily find other related topics, till at last, as the field continually widens, you will both be amazed to see how many common interests, desires, beliefs you had, and how much unexpected benefit each has received from the other. Were there no other advantage to be sought from the power of general conversation, this alone should be enough to induce us to cultivate it: that so many uncomfortable social distinctions would thereby be removed. Have you not heard it often said, that, if certain classes only "knew each other better," they would be better friends, no longer separated by mutual envies, jealousies, and contempt? Now conversation is the readiest way to this mutual acquaintance, and it specially behooves one of the educated class to make the first advances in conversation. I have in my mind an instance of a man of natural reserve and diffidence, and of scholastic habits, who greatly to his grief had the reputation among some uneducated people of being "proud." But having occasion to do some little service to a woman of this class, he entered her plain dwelling, seated himself at once as if at home, and had no sooner uttered a few words of sympathy, such as the occasion called for, than all that suspicion of pride was most thoroughly dissipated, leaving only the wonder that it could ever have been entertained. My friend, will you not, in this world of frequent misunderstanding, do your part, by _word_ as well as deed, to show others, whom society classes below you, that you are not divided from them in respect to all those great interests which make the true dignity of human nature? Talk of the virtue of silence! I will tell you from my own experience of a thousand cases where the simple failure to speak has kept up a coolness and alienation which one little word would have dispersed forever. Among the many sins and weaknesses which I have to lay at my own door, few give me greater compunction than the cowardice--or whatever else it was--which kept back the timely words that ought to have been uttered, but were not.